Curriculum CornerThe Importance of Reading Fluency by Leigh Volkers

Fluent reading comprises three key elements: accurate reading of connected text at a conversational rate with appropriate expression. Each aspect of fluency has a clear connection to text comprehension. Without accurate word reading, the reader will not hear the authors intended meaning; inaccurate word reading can lead to misinterpretations of the text. When a child has poor automaticity in word reading and has to work hard to decode each word, the child most likely is devoting the majority of his/her cognitive capacity to the task of decoding words and does not have the cognitive capacity needed to also assign meaning to the text. Poor expression can lead to confusion through inappropriate or meaningless groupings of words or through inappropriate applications of expression. Research has demonstrated the importance of fluency in the development of reading proficiency. Reading fluency is one of the defining characteristics of good readers, and a lack of fluency is a common characteristic of poor readers. Differences in reading fluency not only distinguish good readers from poor, but a lack of reading fluency is also a reliable predictor of reading comprehension problems. Once beginning readers learn soundsymbol relationships and become accurate decoders, their lack of fluency emerges as the next hurdle they face on their way to reading proficiency. As a beginning reader, your child has worked hard to learn letter-sound associations and how to blend sounds together to decode a word. Often, beginning readers get stuck at this stage of reading development and become over reliant on phonics and sounding words out. Children who are stuck at this level read in a labored, disconnected fashion with a focus on decoding at the word level. This lack of fluent reading is a problem for these readers because most of their attention is focused on decoding words and not on making meaning out of what is being read. Children who are stuck at this level do not have the understanding that reading should always be for meaning, they think of reading as correctly decoding each word in isolation. There are a few simple things that we can do to help children successfully move beyond the phonics/decoding words level. When you think about how we as adults read, we do not look at individual letters and blend the sounds together. As adults, we rely on recognizing many words by sight and using the context of our reading to make predictions about the other words, and then we quickly scan the word to confirm our prediction. Now think about these few words: light, enough, and bread. These are all words that children in our class encountered this week during guided reading instruction. Would you expect a beginning reader to be able to decode these words? Certainly not, but they can certainly figure these words out in the context of a story and with picture clue support. Over time and with repeated exposure to words like this, they will gain a sight memory for these words and will be able to read them out of context and without picture support. The key for beginning readers to become fluent readers is to focus their attention on the picture clues provided and the meaning of the story. Before each guided reading group, I remind the children that good readers look at the picture and think about what is happening in the story on each new page BEFORE they try to read the page. The children also know that when good readers encounter a tricky word, they get their mouth ready to say the beginning sound of the word (blending all letters which come before the first vowel in the word) and look at the picture for clues.

Here are strategies to use at home to help ensure that your child is reading for meaning: 1. Do a picture walk with your child prior to him/her reading the book to you. Briefly look through the pictures in the book and talk about what you see happening in the story. This is a great time to introduce vocabulary from the book that your child may not already be familiar with. 2. As your child reads the story to you, periodically ask him/her to summarize the events which have already taken place and predict what will happen next. 3. When your child encounters a challenging word, prompt him/her with What would make sense here? What would you expect that word to be? Is there anything in the picture that will help you? 4. If what your child reads is incorrect, remember to focus on meaning first, then picture support and only finally letter-sound (phonics) support. Please see the phrases below from my Guiding Your Childs Reading At Home Curriculum Corner which will help you to present your child with questions which will deepen his/her understanding of the reading process.

Guiding Your Childs Reading At Home

At this stage, as a beginning reader, your childs attention will be focused on the following items when reading: -Making sure that the story makes sense -Using the picture clues to help him/her read the story -Using the letter clues to help him/her read the story

Below I have included some phrases that you may want to use with your child as he/she reads to you. These are phrases that I use with the children during guided reading sessions. Using these phrases will help your child to develop strong reading skills, as they draws your childs attention first to the meaning of what is being read and then to the picture and letter clues on the page. - If what he/she reads does not make sense: Lets think about that. Did that make sense? How could you fix it? - If what he/she reads makes sense but does not match the picture: That made sense, but does it match the picture? - If what he/she reads makes sense and matches the picture but does not match the words written: (For example, the text says In the water but your child reads In the lake.) You would say, That made sense and it matches the picture, but lets look closely at the words. You said in the lake, if this word was lake (point to the word water) what letter would you expect to see at the beginning? Thats right; you would expect to see an l at the beginning of lake. Is this an l? Can this word be lake? What word could this be?